Human sniffles kill endangered chimps

SHOULD sneezing wild apes be given antibiotics? That’s the dilemma facing biologists in Africa, who have confirmation that wild chimps are dying from human respiratory diseases.

Fabian Leendertz of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany, runs a chimp health project in the Tai forest in Ivory Coast. Leendertz and colleagues found either human respiratory syncytial virus, or human metapneumovirus, in apes that died during outbreaks of respiratory disease between 1999 and 2005, as well as pathogenic bacteria such as Streptococcus. The viruses commonly cause cold symptoms in human adults, and can be serious in children (Current Biology, DOI&colon; …

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